The Lo-Tech Times of Childhood (Life’s a Journey Series, Week 16)

This post is part of a weekly series of ‘link-up’ Posts which reflect on life’s journey, old memories and family stories(see below for more info).

Tape to tape, record to tape, radio to tape. You choose, baby.

When I was growing up, I can remember that my Aunt had an awe-inspiring piece of tech equipment in her house. It looked like this, above. A ‘stereo’ in a sideboard. Nice, eh? I thought it was a. mazing. But there was a dawn of a new era just around the corner for music. In the early 80s we packed away our record player in a suitcase and went on a family shopping trip. We were suddenly the proud and very modern owners of a ‘stacking’ stereo system. This little beauty would not only play our 7 and 12 inch vinyl treasures, but also had two (count them, TWO) cassette tape decks, so that we

Use a pencil to rewind me

could record from one to the other. This required deft fingers and multiple attempts in order to remove the ‘clicking’ sounds as you pressed the ‘play’ and ‘record’ buttons down at the same time.

As for the telephone technology of this period, this was a purely static device with a large and rather cumbersome round ‘dial’ which would click a lot when you poked your finger in its holes and turned it. Always worth starting a couple of minutes early if it was a long number. In the early 80s, however, a new kind of ‘cool’ came to town in the form of the ‘Brick’. Not really handbag material.

The Brick

But the telephone paled into insignificance in terms of importance compared with the TV set. I can remember the day when our Rumbelow’s rented TV was upgraded to a new set. It still had the same three crappy channels with very little content on any of them, but a new gadget was now in our possession. The introduction of a hand-held remote control brought a whole

I'm so close I could reach it from here myself

new kind of lazy into our lives. We now no longer had to actually get up to flick from BBC to ITV. Unbelievable. Here beginneth the downfall of the human race.

As if that wasn’t enough, the world changed for good when some Dweeb at Sony brought us the ‘Betamax’ system. Now we could actually go and eat our tea in the dining room (snore) and still not miss Blue Peter! Things couldn’t get any better than this, surely, we sighed….

It'll never go out of date

But it seems our astonishment was not yet complete. This small box of talking images which sat in the corner of the Anaglypta-clad lounge would soon be playing host to the one and only Atari 2000. Video games cometh.

Granted, my brother and I had to curb our enthusiasm during the necessary hour-long warm-up period, as wires were disentangled, plugged in, plugged out and back in again, and the long-awaited picture began to crystallise on screen.

But when it did, BOY did we PONG!!!

Please tell me you remember all this old paraphernalia!! If you were a child of the 60s, 70s, 80s or beyond, we’d love to hear about the technologies of your youth, so share your memories with us here.

Post an entry to your own Blog and use the Linky tool (link below) to enter your memories into the fray. If you like, just leave a comment and join in that way, but do join in.If you feel sexy, grab the code too (just follow the link) and post it into your Blog entry – that way, everyone can pay it forward as they say – it’s good to share.

Please visit the other blogs on the list and leave a comment or two – it makes everyone’s day!

Next week I am going tartan! Rollermania will be back in town as we cut a rug with the Bay City Roller boys and say ‘Bye Bye Baby’. Post your memories of the band and join in with next week’s Linky (Tues)…..

I was just talking about tapes and tape players to my oldest who is 5 last night as he was sent home a tape from school in his story sack and we didn’t have anything to play it on. They were so common and now the kids have never seen one before. x